I don’t like change.  I never have liked change, and anyone who knows me well knows this about me.  Now I would assume that it would be hard on ANYONE to lose every single personal possession to fire, to have to move into a new house with all new things in it, but it’s got to be even worse for a person who is resistant to change, right?
For a long time I felt kind of like a stranger in my own home, like I was just staying in a really nice hotel.
But my bedroom was different.  It quickly began to feel like home, safe, a sanctuary.  The furniture we were given for that room is nice furniture–French Provincial in style, like the bedroom set I grew up with (gone in the fire because it had been passed down to Emily), but made, I think, of walnut.  Someone gave me a bedspread that was just like one of Mima’s that I had.  I put out Mima’s afghans that had come back to me.  I filled the room with books.
Most of the furniture we lost in the fire was antique or at least vintage, most of it acquired from my friend Antoinette’s store, Myrtle’s Mess.  It exactly suited our Victorian house, and it suited my taste as well.  We had pieces from many eras, and I grew to love the Art Deco style.  We had a cabinet radio, two bureaus, and a wardrobe for this era.  They were scattered about the house but I cherished a vision of the future when these pieces would be united in one room and maybe I would get more of them.  My Granny had the waterfall style pieces in her bedroom, which may have been one reason I felt drawn to this style.
Now, John’s grandmother had an absolutely gorgeous bedroom set.  Below are pictures I took of it right after her funeral.  You can just ignore that person who appears in the mirror. 😉



 
I had coveted that furniture for YEARS, and Grandma knew it, too.  She had told me directly that I could have it when she was gone.
And last weekend was the unexpectedly early moving day.
Problem was, when I took the above pictures, I had JUST FOUND OUT (like, less than 24 hours before) that my house had been burned to the ground, that I had nothing and that I was homeless.  Whereas, now, I’ve been living in this house, in my sanctuary bedroom, for over a year.  And whenever I started thinking about the new furniture coming, I started feeling strange, almost panicky, like I even might start to cry.  And yet I knew I loved and had always wanted the furniture, and that moreover ours is the only suitable room for it in the house.
I understand what was going on with me psychologically, that the resident furniture was a comfort to me in a traumatic time and that was why it was so hard to let go of.  But those feelings definitely added to the stress of last weekend, as did memories awakened by the cleaning out of the garage (the subject of my next post, probably).
But I did it.  I embraced change, and in a day or so I will have pictures of my newly-decorated room to share.